Toots 🦣 from 10/16 to 10/20

As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I don’t notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by message length.

Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:07 – Mon 16 October 2023

Content Warning: Racist Violence

Image Not Shown: Dressed in orange prison garb, Name-Redacted is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 10 Black people in Buffalo, N.Y.

Today’s white working-class young men who turn to racist violence are part of a long, sad American history from The Conversation

These gangs prowled the streets in automobiles and attacked African Americans, burned black homes and businesses, and kept the fires of racial violence inflamed for days. They blamed Black men for invading their communities.

Hashtags: #Racism #USHistory

Note that this doesn’t even count how many immigrant communities “became white” by identifying with hatred of Black neighbors, or the local insurrections during Reconstruction, when white people attacked their town and county governments, because some Black people got elected.

12:05 – Mon 16 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:01 – Tue 17 October 2023

Image Not Shown: A rainbow flag sweeps across São Paulo's architectural landmarks, wrapping the Avenida Paulista in the colors of queer and trans pride

Snapshots of an LGBTQ+ immigrant and refugee community in Brazil from Global Voices

Brazil has led rankings of violence against trans people for years, and registered 273 killings of LGBTQ+ people in 2022, according to a report by the Observatory of Deaths and Violence against LGBTI+ in Brazil.

Hashtags: #Brazil #LGBT #Refugees

This article makes the interesting point that, despite the danger to refugees—especially of gender and sexual minorities—Brazil has become a destination, because it stands out by at least offering legal protection to them.

12:03 – Tue 17 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.

Samuel Johnson

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:02 – Wed 18 October 2023

Image Not Shown: Industrial ventilation, air conditioning installed on the old textured shabby wall with natural defects. Blue abstract wall with scratches, cracks, chips, irregularities

Team finds sustainable alternative to air conditioning from Futurity

But there is untapped potential for integrating them into architectural design more fully, so they can not only reject indoor heat to outer space in a passive way, but also drive regular and healthy air changes.

Hashtags: #Sustainability #Temperature

This doesn’t provide too many specifics, unfortunately, but at least sounds promising.

12:01 – Wed 18 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

We are like vessels tossed on the bosom of the deep; our passions are the winds that sweep us impetuously forward; each pleasure is a rock; the whole life is a wide ocean. Reason is the pilot to guide us, but often allows itself to be led astray by the storms of pride.

Pietro Metastasio

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:06 – Thu 19 October 2023

Content Warning: US Politics

Image Not Shown: A Moms for Liberty rally

Moms for Liberty’s school board takeover strategy is meeting pushback from Daily Kos

The right-wing school board members are “using lawyers as a weapon against the public, basically to create roadblocks hoping that you just eventually give up”…

Hashtags: #Education #LGBT #MomsForLiberty

I feel like I say this a lot, here, but you really should notice how unstoppable right-wing movements look…until people stop tolerating them.

12:04 – Thu 19 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Low-minded men are occupied solely with their own affairs, but noble-minded men take special interest in the affairs of others. The submarine fire drinks up the ocean, to fill its insatiable interior; the rain-cloud, that it may relieve the drought of the earth, burnt up by the hot season.

Bhartṛhari

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:04 – Fri 20 October 2023

Content Warning: Twitter, Coarse Language

Image Not Shown: An Old West saloon with the X logo above the doors and a grinning Elon Musk poking his head out a window

Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR’s traffic from Pluralistic

All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits.

Hashtags: #Twitter #SocialMedia #NPR

I sometimes think back to somewhere around 1994, when I sat around with a group of fellow then-young developers, and we sketched out a broad vision for a service that we’d all later see as social media. It would consist of a directory to find people, a messaging system, and a public-facing web-page where people could post updates. Why have you never heard of this project? Someone in the group—it sounds like me, but I don’t want to accidentally take credit for someone else’s idea based only on that—pointed out that (a) we already had this in e-mail and the web, (b) the parts that the Internet doesn’t have (like a directory of all users) felt prone to abuse, and (c) it would cost a fortune to run, if it became successful, with no non-abusive or even sustainable business model. As such, we threw the idea away, knowing that none of these companies would last long. It looks like we had it right…

12:06 – Fri 20 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Two persons die remorseful: he who possessed and enjoyed not, and he who knew but did not practice.

Sa’dī

Hashtags: #Quotes

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.

Image Not Shown: Composite image made up of 8 photographs vertically sliced, side-by-side. Each photograph is a portrait of a Black individual

‘My Hair Is Not…’ from the Wellcome Collection

They had all been subject to microaggressions – insidious, often subtle, verbal, behavioral or environmental slights – in relation to their hair. These comments can be both intentional and unintentional, but they always convey hostile, derogatory or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.

Honestly, it stuns me that this happens at all, let alone that it still happens. Other than “your hair looks nice,” I actually have trouble imagining having something to say about someone’s hair, and certainly don’t want to touch it…

Image Not Shown: Sasha Skochilenko, 33, is a Petersburg-based artist and volunteer

She faces 10 years in jail for anti-war stickers – now she’s being starved from openDemocracy

But the judge claims that Skochilenko, an artist, could have ensured her heart monitor was charged in advance, and refuses.

We have more important things going on in the world, at the moment, but you can generally tell the quality of a national regime by its political prisoners. When “anti-war stickers” make an enemy of the state, you have serious problems…

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Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.